Across the Limpopo [antikvár]

1 SOUTH AFRICAfThe Owner-Driver's Guide to African By-Ways'WE WERE IN NO HURRY to leave. Four years of African sun had spoilt us. It had bleached our hair, browned our skins and had given us crowsfeet in the corners of our eyes, permanently creased by looking into bright African skies and across far African horizons.We had had four wonderful years of travel to all corners of southern Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope in the south where two oceans meet; across the Kalahari Desert to Fish River Canyon and the Skeleton Coast in South-West Africa on the shores of the Atlantic; to the Wild Coast and Port St Johns on the Transkei shores of the Indian Ocean. We had been to the Inyanga Mountains, Lake Kariba, Victoria Falls, the mighty Zambesi in what was once called Rhodesia. We had swum in the crystal-clear waterfalls in the mountain forests of Swaziland, tobogganed across the ski-slopes on the 'roof of Africa' in Lesotho. I had canoed through the swamps and riverlets of the Okavango River.We had motored and flown, back and forth and up and down the length and breadth of South Africa, photographing cheetah cubs in Kruger National Park, and looking for fools' gold at Mount Sheba and Pilgrim's Rest, high up in the Drakensbergs; hurtling thousands of feet down the mine shafts under Johannesburg, deep into the source of South Africa's wealth, to touch the gold seams of the Reef. And we